MainMarketsFacebook to prioritize news from 'high quality' and 'trustworthy' sources

Facebook to prioritize news from 'high quality' and 'trustworthy' sources

20 January, 2018

This comes after putting loads of effort into building up Facebook as the place where people get their news. This means users will see fewer posts from news organizations while scrolling through their feeds in favor of more posts from friends.

Facebook founder MarkZuckerberg said Friday (Jan. 19) that starting next, week the social media site will start prioritizing news sites.

He said that there was too much sensationalism, misinformation and polarization in the world, and that if social media does not become part of the solution, it is part of the problem.

For the first change in the USA next week, publications deemed trustworthy by people using Facebook may see an increase in their distribution.

Facebook says it will start sorting news sources by how "trustworthy" its users think they are - a major change as the social media giant continues to come under fire over the spread of misinformation on its platform. It also said it would put an emphasis on local news sources.

News outlets that score well can expect to see their stories to be more widely distributed on Facebook, while those with lower scores might see less activity.

News Corp, owner of the New York Post and other outlets, responded to the earlier Facebook announcement with a pledge to look for "any signs that the weighting of news sites is politically motivated". For some time, we have argued that Facebook should give priority to news from trusted sources.

Facebook wants its users to decide which media outlets they trust most. The new program won't affect how much news people see in their feed, according to the company. After some difficulty, Zuckerberg and Facebook chose to let users rank news source trustworthiness.

"We decided that having the communitydetermine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective", Zuckerbergwrote. Is this latest change to let users rank news source trustworthiness a good approach?

Facebook recently announced other reforms that, the company estimates, will result in less news in the News Feed overall - from the current 5 percent down to an estimated 4 percent.

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